"We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading
reality."

-Ayn Rand

"The ego loves its resentment of reality. What is reality? Whatever is.
Buddha called it tatata-the suchness of life, which is no more than the
suchness of this moment. Opposition toward that suchness is one of the main
features of the ego. It creates the negativity that the ego thrives on, the
unhappiness that it loves. In this way, you make yourself and others suffer and
don't even know that you are doing it., don't know that you are creating hell on
earth. To create suffering without recognizing it-this is the essence of
un-conscious living; this is being totally in the grip of the ego. The extent of
the ego's inability to recognize itself and see what it is doing is staggering
and unbelievable. It will be exactly what it condemns others for and not see it.
When it is point out, it will use angry denial, clever arguments and
self-justifications to distort the facts. People do it, corporations do it,
governments do it. When all else fails, the ego will resort to shouting or even
to physical violence. Send in the marines. We can no understand the deep wisdom
in Jesus' words on the cross: "Forgive them for they know not what they do."

-Eckhart Tolle

A New Earth

"Reality is more Fantastic than any fantasy."

-Erich von Daniken

"After all, what is reality anyway?

Nothin' but a collective hunch."

-Jane Wagner

"I am afraid of this word 'reality," not constituting an ordinarily definable
characteristic of the things it is applied to, but used as though it were some
kind of celestial halo. I very much doubt If anyone of us has the faintest idea
of what is meant by the reality or existence of anything but our own egos."

Sir Arthur Eddington

"....all knowledge about reality begins with experience and terminates in
it."

-Albert Einstein

"The distinction between what is real and what is imaginary is not one that
can be finely maintained....all existing things are ....imaginary."

-John S. MacKenzie (1860-1935), philsopher

"We are suspended in language in such a way that we cannot say what is
up and what is down. The word 'reality' is also a word, a word which we must
learn to use correctly."

-Niels Bohr

"The stupendous fact that we stand in the midst of reality will always
be something far more wonderful than anything else we do."

Erich Gutkind

"Pay less attention to kings and troop movements, the squabbles for
power. Let big outer events go by without much notice. What's real is your
friendship with mystery, the intuitive communion there."

-Bahauddin (The Father of Rumi)

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go
away."

-Philip K. Dick

I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon

"If you listen carefully

now you will hear....

Things are not the way

they used to be,

Don't tell no lie;

One and all got to

face reality now."

-Bob Marley

"The real world is not easy to live in. It is rough; it is slippery.
Without the most clear-eyed adjustments we fall and get crushed. A man must stay
sober: not always, but most of the time."

-Clarence Day

"attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be
attained only by someone who is detached."

Simone Weil

"Only when all the crutches and props are broken....and there is no hope
for security, does it become possible to experience....the archetype of
meaning."

-C.G. Jung

"Set up as an ideal the facing of reality as honestly and cheerfully as
possible."

Dr. Karl A. Menninger

"Reality in our century is not something to be faced."

-Graham Greene

Our Man in Havana

"Once you are real you can't become unreal again. It lasts for
always."

-Margery Williams

"To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in
prose. People don't deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in
front of them. To hell with them."

-Louis-Ferdinand Celine

""How hard it is, sometimes, to trust the evidence of one’s
senses! How reluctantly the mind consents to reality!

Norman Douglas

"Reality is the name we give to our mistakes."

Oscar Wilde

"Some people are still unaware that reality contains unparalleled
beauties. The fantastic and unexpected, the ever-changing and renewing is nowhere
so exemplified as in real life itself."

Berenice Abbot

"This is most people's reality: As soon as something is
perceived, it is named, interpreted, compared with something else, liked,
disliked, or called good or bad by the phantom self, the ego. They are
imprisoned in thought forms, in object consciousness.

You do not awaken spiritually until the compulsive and
unconscious naming ceases, or at least you become aware of it and thus are able
to observe it as it happens. It is through this constant naming that the ego
remains in place as the unobserved mind. Whenever it ceases and even when you
just become aware of it, there is inner space, and you are not possessed by the
mind anymore."

-Eckhart Tolle

A New Earth

"We should tackle reality

in a slightly humorous way;

Otherwise, we miss its point."

Lawrence Durrell

"We loosely talk of Self-realization, for lack of a better term. But how
can one realize or make real that which alone is real? All we need to do is
give up our habit of regarding as real that which is unreal. All religious
practices are meant solely to help us do this. When we stop regarding the unreal
as real, then reality alone will remain, and we will be that."

Ramana Maharshi (1879-1950)

"When we have seen the vision of Reality our world is
changed, utterly and almost beyond recognition, and yet nothing has changed in
things as they are, it is but that we have gained a new vision....It is the new
vision, which is born when man is freed from the tyranny of illusion, that the
whole world is changed and appears radiant with love and beauty, apparently
utterly changed, though the change really is in man himself alone."

J.J. Van Der Leeuw

The Conquest of Illusion

"Reality is simply the loss of the ego. Destroy the ego by seeking its
identity. It will automatically vanish and reality will shine forth by itself.
This is the direct method.

There is no greater mystery than this, that we keep seeking
reality though in fact we are reality. We think that there is something
hiding reality and that this must be destroyed before reality is gained. How
ridiculous! A day will dawn when you will laugh at all your past efforts. That
which will be on the day you laugh is also here and now."

Ramana Maharshi

"Sham and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is
fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves
to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we know, would be like a
fairy tale and the Arabian Nights' Entertainments. If we respected only what is
inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the
streets. When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy
things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty
pleasures are but the shadow of reality. This is always exhilarating and
sublime. By closing the eyes and slumbering, and consenting to be deceived by
shows, men establish and confirm their daily of routing and habit everywhere,
which still is built on purely illusory foundations. Children, who play life,
discern its true law...."

Henry David Thoreau

Walden

"I stick my finger into existence-it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who
am I? How came I here? What is this thing called the world? What does this word
mean?

Soren Kierkegaard

""In an age of synthetic images and synthetic emotions, the chances
of an accidental encounter with reality are remote indeed."

"We discover that the universe shows evidence of a designing or controlling
power that has something in common with our own individual minds."

-Sir James Jeans

"That consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown; that there
is only one thing and that, which seems to be a plurality, is merely a series of
different aspects of this one thing."

-Erin Schrodinger

"Facing the bluntness of reality is the highest form of sanity and
enlightened vision....Devotion proceeds through various stages of unmasking
until we reach the point of seeing the world directly and simply without
imposing our fabrications....There may be a sense of being lost or exposed a
sense of vulnerability. That is simply a sign that ego is losing its grip on its
territory; it is not a threat."

-Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

"When we are unhurried and wise we perceive that only great and worthy
things have any permanent and absolute existence-that petty fears are but the
shadow of reality. This always exhilarating and sublime."

-Henry David Thoreau

"How reality feels. People addicted to busyness, people who don't just use
their cell phones in public but display in every nuance of cell-phone deportment
their sense of throbbing connectedness to Something important-these people would
suffocate like fish on a dock if they were cut off from the Flow of Events they
have conspired with their fellows to create. To these plugged-in players, the
rest of us look like zombies, coasting on fumes. For them, the feeling of being
busy is the feeling of being alive."

-Thomas de Zengotita

"Everybody wants to know

What can I do? We all want to save the planet

pick up the garbage. Free our brothers and sisters

stop war and bring the millennium

but what can I do, seriously?

Okay, seriously:

get to reality,

get to your own reality

Become yourself.

become incredibly high and real and influence

everyone around you with your vibrations,

no matter how difficult it is.

drop everything else and

start doing the most fantastic, real things you

can think of-

become yourself

get to your own reality."

-Paul Williams

Das energi

"What is reality? Answering this superficially simple
question is like trying to eat porridge with your fingers. It has occupied the
minds of the greatest philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose opinion
was that the solution to the mystery of space and time 'lies outside space and
time.' Emmanuel Kant referred to 'reality' as the 'Ding-an-Sich' or 'Thing in
Itself' which is intrinsically unknowable and perceived dimly through our
natural senses.'

-Frank Close

Lucifer's Legacy: The Meaning of Asymmetry

"One Nature, perfect and pervading, circulates in all natures,

One reality, all-comprehensive, contains within itself all realities.

-Yung-chia Ta-shih

"Man is wiser than his intellect....his whole organism has a wisdom and
purposiveness which goes well beyond his conscious thought.....I think men and
women, individually and collectively are inwardly and organismically rejecting
the view of one single culture-approved reality. i believe they are moving
inevitably toward the acceptance of millions of separate, challenging exciting
informative individual perceptions of reality. i regard it as possible that this
view-like the simultaneous and separate discovery of the principles of quantum
mechanics by scientists in different countries-may begin to come into effective
existence in many parts of the world at once. if so, we would be living in a
totally new universe, different from any in history."

-Carl Rogers

"....We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. and
while you are studying that reality-judiciously, as you will- we'll act again,
creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things
will sort out. We're history's actors....and you all of you, will be left to
just study what we do."

an unnamed aide to President George W. Bush in 2002

New York Times magazine

**************

Book: "The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of
Reality" by Brian Greene

Book: "The Road To Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the
Universe" by Roger Penrose

Book: "The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the
Universe" by Roger Penrose